Dr.

Richard Clarke LITS3304 Notes 11B

1 STUAR T HALL CULTURAL IDENTITY AND DIASPORA

In this essay, Hall considers the nature of the black subject (392) who is represented by film and other form s of visual representation of the Afro-Caribbean (and Asian) blacks of the diasporas of the W est (392). W ho is this emergent, new subject of the cinema? From where does he/she speak? (392). Referring to the seminal work of m ile Benveniste (signalled by the gesture tow ards enunication [392]), he contends that what recent theories of enunciation suggest is that, though we speak, so to say in our own name, of ourselves and from our own experience, nevertheless who speaks, and the subject who is spoken of, are never identical, never exactly in the same place. (392) Halls thesis is that rather than thinking of identity as an already accomplished fact, which the new cultural practices then represent (392), we should think instead of identity as a production which is never complete, always in process, and always constituted within, not outside, representation (392). Hall points out that there are two principal ways of thinking about (cultural) identity. The traditional model views identity in terms of one, shared culture, a sort of collective one true self, hiding inside the many other, more superficial or artificially imposed selves, which people with a shared history and ancestry hold in common. . . . This oneness, underlying all the other, more superficial differences, is the truth, the essence of Caribbeanness, of the black experience. It is this identity which a Caribbean or black diaspora m ust discover, excavate, bring to light and express. . . . (393) Hall acknowledges that the rediscovery of this identity is often the object of what Frantz Fanon once called a passionate research (393) and that such a conception of cultural identity played a crucial role in all postcolonial struggles (393). However, he questions whether such a view m erely entails unearthing that which the colonial experience buried and overlaid (393). For him, it is better to envision a quite different practice (393), one based on not the rediscovery but the production of identity. Not an identity grounded in the archaeology, but in the re-telling of the past (393). Such a viewpoint would entail acknowledging that this is an act of imaginative rediscovery (393), one which involves imposing an im aginary coherence on the experience of dispersal and fragmentation, which is the history of all enforced diasporas (394) and leads to the restoration of an imaginary fullness or plentitude, to set against the broken rubric of our past (394). Africa, he stresses, is the name of the missing term, the great aporia, which lies at the centre of our cultural identity and gives it a meaning which, until recently, it lacked (394). The second model of (cultural) identity (which Hall favours) ac knowledges the critical points of deep and significant difference which constitute what we really are; or rather--since history has intervened--what we have become (394). From this point of view, cultural identity is a matter of becoming as well as of being. It belongs to the future as m uch as to the past. It is not something which already exists, transcending place, time, history and culture. Cultural identities com e from somewhere, have histories. But like everything which is historical, they undergo constant transformation. Far from being eternally fixed in some essentialised pa st, they are subject to the continuous play of history, culture and power. Far from being grounded in mere recovery of the past, which is waiting to be found, and which when found, will secure our sense of ourselves into eternity, identities are the names we give to the different ways we are positioned by, and position ourselves within, the narratives of the past. (394) Drawing upon the work of Michel Foucault and Edward Said, Hall argues that cognizance must be taken of the ways in which black people, black experiences, were positioned and subject-ed in the dominant regimes of representation (394), these latter being the effects of a critical exercise of cultural power and normalisation. Not only, in Saids Orientalist sense, were we constructed as different and other within the categories of knowledge of the W est by those regimes. They had the power to make us see and experience ourselves as Other (394). Hall stresses that it is one thing to position a subject or set of peoples as the Other of a dom inant discourse. It is quite another thing to subject them to that knowledge, not only as a matter of imposed will and domination, by the power of inner compulsion and subjective con-formation to the norm (394). Hence, from this perspective, it must be acknowledged that cultural identity

Dr. Richard Clarke LITS3304 Notes 11B

is not a fixed essence at a ll, lying unchanged outside history and culture. It is not some universal and transcendental spirit inside us on which history has made no fundamental mark. It is not once-and-for-all. It is not a fixed origin to which we can m ake som e final and absolute Return. (395) Cultural identities are the unstable points of identification . . . which are made, within the discourses of history and culture (394). The foregoing raises an indispensable question: if identity does not proceed, in a straight unbroken line, from some fixed origin, how are we to understand its formation? (395). In response, Hall offers his model of Caribbean identity. He suggests that we should think of black Caribbean identities as framed by two axes or vectors, simultaneously operative: the vector of similarity or continuity [the first m odel of identity]; and the vector of difference and rupture (395). Em ploying a Bakhtinian metaphor, he contends that these two axes exist in a dialogic relationship (395): paradoxically, what we share is precisely the experience of a profound discontinuity (395). To be precise, the uprooting of slavery and transportation and the insertion into the plantation eco nomy (as well as the symbolic economy) of the W estern world . . . unified these peoples across their differences, in the same mom ent as it cut them off from direct access to their past. (396) Firstly, Africa and India are not monolithically united entities. Moreover, each island is profoundly different from the others. W hat is more, we do not stand in quite the same relationship of otherness to the metropolitan centres. Difference, therefore, persists--in and alongside continuity (396), Hall stresses. The task for Hall is, therefore, how to describe this play of difference within identity (396). W hile he acknowledges that a common history has unified us across our differences, this comm on history does not constitute a common origin, since it was, m etaphorically as well as literally, a translation (396). Drawing upon the work of Jacques Derrida, Hall contends that such cultural play could not be represented . . . as a sim ple binary opposition--past/present, them/us. Its complexity exceed this binary structure of representation. At different places, times, in relation to different questions, the boundaries are re-sited (396). Hall finds Derridas notion of diffrance particularly useful to describe that special and peculiar supplement which the black and mulatto skin adds to the refinement and sophistication (397) of European culture. Diffrance challenges the fixed binaries which stabilise meaning and representation and show how meaning is never fixed or completed, but keeps on moving on to encom pass other, additional or supplem entary meanings (397). The question is: where does identity come in to this infinite postponement of meaning? (397). Hall contends, gesturing towards the Derridean view that people arrest signifying play in a Procrustean fashion, that m eaning depends upon the contingent and arbitrary stop (397). Such a view does not contradict the view that meaning is potentially infinite: it only threatens to do so if we mistake this cut of identity--this positioning, which makes m eaning possible--as a natural and permanent, rather than an arbitrary and contingent ending. . . . Meaning continues to unfold . . . beyond the arbitrary closure which m akes it, at any m oment, possible. . . There is always something left over (396). Drawing upon Derridas notion of diffrance, Hall posits that it is possible to rethink the positioning and repositioning of Caribbean cultural identities in relation to at least three presences, to borrow Aim Csaires and Lopold Senghors metaphor: Prsence Africaine, Prsence Europene, and Prsence Amricaine (398), none of which can ever be fully present (presence is deferred). (The last of these is Halls term for the New W orld, the juncture-point where the many cultural tributaries m eet [400], the primal scene [401] where the fateful/fatal encounter was staged between Africa and the We st [401]). Drawing upon both the spatial and temporal metaphors which Derrida employs, Hall is im plicitly and simultaneously comparing Caribbean society to a sign within a wider sign-system, a signifier located along the chain of signification and, by extension, a text which is linked intertextually to other region-texts. 1 Drawing upon the notions of both displacement and deferral, Hall insinuates that the Caribbean is neither an isolatable and autonomous place which exists in a

The first philosopher to think of culture as if it were a text was the Structuralist anthropologist Claude Lvi-Strauss whose work was very influenced by Saussures model of the sign. See his The Principles of Kinship in his The Elementary Structures of Kinship.

Dr. Richard Clarke LITS3304 Notes 11B

social and historical vacuum nor is the past separable from the present. Rather, the Caribbean as we know it today is a dynamic entity produced by its relation to those other socio-historical entities whose inhabitants migrated to and came to form the region. Interestingly, in an omission as grave as those exclusions for which he would not fail to censure European racists, Hall fails to make any mention of that very Prsence Indienne to which he himself had alluded and whose influence is very m arked in countries such as Trinidad and Guyana. By far the most important region-sign-signifier-text in this regard is evidently, in the light of what Hall writes earlier, the African presence. (Europes legacy is an undeniable, ineluctable but troubling one for most Caribbean persons to confront. For many of us, this is a matter not of too little but of too m uch [399], he writes. The question is, can we ever recognise its irreversible influence, whilst resisting its imperialising eye? [400], he asks.) Africa is the site of the repressed (398), the signified which could not be represented directly in slavery (398) but which remained and rem ains the unspoken unspeakable presence in Caribbean culture (398). Gesturing to the early work of thinkers like Brathwaite (e.g. Timehri), Hall is at pains to stress that it is not a question of ever recovering a lost Africa per se: whether it is . . . an origin of our identities, unchanged by four hundred years of displacem ent, dismem berment, transportation, to which we could in any final or literal sense re turn, is . . . open to doubt. The o riginal Africa is no longer there. It too has been transformed. History is, in that sense, irreversible. W e must not collude with the W est which, precisely, normalises and appropriates Africa by freezing it into som e tim eless zone of the primitive and unchanging past. Africa m ust at last be reckoned with by Ca ribbean people, but it cannot in any sim ple sense be merely recovered. (399) Rather, Hall is gesturing to the new texts of all kinds, literary, filmic, etc., even the new social texts of Africa which Caribbean persons have managed to fashion in their quest for nationhood. Writing with reference to Jamaica, Hall argues that an Afro-Caribbean identity became historically available (398) to Caribbean persons only in the 1970's through an indigenous cultural revolution (398), through the impact on popular life of the post-colonial revolution, the civil rights struggles, the culture of Rastafarianism and the music of reggae (398). These and related factors made possible or became the metaphors, the figures or signifiers of a new construction of Jam aican-ness (398). These and similar cultural endeavours signified a new Africa of the New W orld, grounded in an old Africa: . . . this Africa, as we might say, . . . as a spiritual, cultural and political metaphor (398): this is the Africa we must return to--but by another route: what Africa has become in the New W orld, what we have m ade of Africa: Africa--as we re tell it through politics, memory and desire (399). From this point of view, Africa has acquired an imaginative or figurative value that we can name and feel. Our belongingness to it constitutes what Benedict Anderson calls an imaginary community (399). This Africa is a necessary part of the Caribbean imaginary (399): the displacement which has marked the region has given rise to a certain imaginary plentitude, recreating the endless desire to return to lost origins, to be one again with the mother, to go back to the beginning (402). Halls notion of diasporic identity is one based upon diffrance and hybridity. It rejects old imperialising (401) and hegemonising (401) forms of ethnicity (401). Gesturing to the ongoing problem of the Palestinian homeland, he argues that his model does not conceptualise the securing of identity sole ly in relation to som e sacred homeland to which they m ust at all costs return, even if it means pushing other peoples into the sea (401). It is defined, not by essence or purity, but by the recognition of a necessary heterogeneity and diversity . . . hybridity (402). Hall claims to offer a different way of thinking about cultural identity (402) by theorising identity as constituted, not outside but within representation (402) and hence of cinema or literature not as a second-order m irror held up to reflect what already exists, but as that form of representation which is able to constitute us as new kinds of subjects, and thereby enable us to discover pla ce s f ro m which to speak (402). Hall ends by citing the relevance to his model of identity of Benedict Andersons redefinition of the community as distinguished, not by their falsity/genuiness, but by the style in which they are imagined (402).